


Essays about Dragon

by anthropophobicameba



Category: Parahumans Series - Wildbow
Genre: Character Analysis, Other, non-fiction
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-08-06
Updated: 2018-09-17
Packaged: 2019-06-23 01:18:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 6,802
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15595044
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anthropophobicameba/pseuds/anthropophobicameba
Summary: A collection of essays, in which I will blatantly project my own emotional issues on to Dragon. Essays will vary in length, formality, and degree of speculation. Warnings provided per essay. Contains spoilers through Ward. May not be WOG compliant.Dragon is a character from the web-serial Worm and its sequel Ward, both written by J.C. McCrae. Worm can be found at https://parahumans.wordpress.com. Ward can be found at https://www.parahumans.net.





	1. Essay One: Humanity, Self-Conception, Trigger Events, and the Word “Father”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> At time of final edits, most recent chapter was Ward 8.10. This essay was adapted from a series of texts sent to friends who also read Worm/Ward. As such, the grammar and formatting may be odd or informal in places, or move from point to point oddly. Final edits were also somewhat rushed, as I wanted to be sure to post this before Ward updates disprove any speculations or provide more scenes I would need to factor in.
> 
> Note: some of the observed shifts in personality and behavior that I build off here may just be due to Wildbow’s shifting writing style. Unfortunately, the nature of serialized fiction makes this somewhat unavoidable. Even where changes are unintentional, I think the narrative they spell out is worth exploring.
> 
> Contains spoilers through Ward 8.2. 
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
> **Warnings:** Mentions and discussion of: child abuse, depersonalization, death, trauma, psychic alterations. Quotes from Worm include descriptions of violence. If there are warnings missing, please inform me.

In fandom discussions and fan works, it's standard for people to refer to Richter as Dragon's father, but she never does outright. At first I thought this was another case of spontaneous fanon, but I think there's a little more to it. The closest she ever gets to referring to him as her father is this metaphor in her interlude:

> Quote 1:  
>  She didn’t enjoy this. What was one supposed to call a father who, with his newborn child fresh out of the womb, severs the tendons of her arms and legs, performs a hysterectomy and holds his hand over her nose and mouth to ensure she suffers brain damage?  
>  The answer was obvious enough. A monster.
> 
> Quote 2:  
>  Except there was a problem, a rub. The man who had created her, the figurative father from her earlier musing, had imposed rules on her to prevent her from reproducing in any fashion.  
> 

Saint does, even, despite all his whining about anthropomorphizing.

From his interlude:

> Quote 1:  
>  The father had feared his child was a monster, enough so that he’d left strangers a weapon to use against her in the event that she proved a danger to humanity.  
>  Now, as Saint watched her reaching further and deeper than she ever had, searching much of America with millions of cameras, saw the machines she brought to the fore, he suspected the father had been right to.
> 
> Quote 2:  
>  The cyborg opened communications to Dragon, but he didn’t speak to her. “Saint. What have you done?”  
>  “What her father asked me to do,” Saint said.  
> 

Richter himself refers to her as his child in his big goodbye:

From Saint’s Interlude:

> “They are my children, and as much as I harbor a kind of terror for what they could do, I love them and hope for great things from them. To keep their power from falling into the wrong hands, I have included a stipulation that a law enforcement officer must input a valid badge number into this device-”  
> 

Now, a part of that is just human characters and human readers flattening the connection to something they can easily relate to. Dragon isn’t human, and doesn’t really want to be, so she has no need or desire to do the same.

But I think there’s a little more there.

Here’s another quote from Saint’s interlude:

> “Your creator isn’t kind,” Saint said. “He warned you about the forbidden fruit, laid the laws out for you. You broke them, ate the fruit. It’s something of a mercy that he punishes you this way instead.”
> 
> “I disagree. On every count. I was the one who made me, who defined myself. This creator is no god, only a cruel, shortsighted man.”

And here’s one from 28.x:

> “I revived her, for one thing. Not the easiest thing in the world to do with the amount of encryption we were talking about. I don’t know if I said, dear Dragon, but I do think your creator did love you in the end. He could have made it harder to break. I think he did want you free in the end.”
> 
> Defiant looked down at Dragon’s head, then clenched his fists.
> 
> “Ironic,” Teacher said.

This is technically speculative, but I feel it's pretty clear that Teacher's goal in that comment was to hurt her. And he chose a rather specific means of doing that. _“I do think your creator did love you…”_

It’s worth noting here that Dragon's trigger event was on the first anniversary of Richter's death.

Dragon as we see her early on, in her interlude and in Defiant’s, distances herself from humanity in the way she talks about herself, thinks about herself.

From her interlude:

> Quote 1:  
>  It chafed, grated, however strange it was for an artificial intelligence to feel such irritation.
> 
> Her creator had done a good job on that front. Ironically.
> 
> Quote 2:  
>  Not because of inherent limitations, like the ones humans had… but because of imposed limitations. Her creator’s.
> 
> Quote 3:  
>  She could not deal with most people because she was not a person. He could not deal with most people because he had never truly learned how. 

From Defiant’s interlude:

> Quote 1:  
>  “How can I be a parahuman if I’m not human to begin with?”
> 
> “I don’t know.”
> 
> “I’m not even close to human. I might be trying to emulate one, but a sea cucumber’s closer to being a human than I am. That doesn’t make sense.”
> 
> Quote 2:  
>  “To look at the code. The fact that you haven’t noticed this yourself suggests there may be a mental block in place.”
> 
> “I don’t have a mind to put any mental block inside. I’m data.”

Now, there’s nothing wrong with her not relating to humanity. “AI strives to become human” is one of the more irritating (and inevitably chock full of bigotries as to what counts as human) Sci-Fi tropes out there, and I’m not sad to see less of it.

But— if Richter made other sapient AIs, it seems none survived him. She has no examples of what it is to be a person beyond humanity, and she knows she's not human. Dragon has no wider frame of reference for AIs. It's her, it's what Richter said and did, it's fiction. There is no greater community for her to fall back on and build up from. Her self-perception is, whatever she may believe, likely to be heavily warped by that.

As a result, she doesn’t just distance herself from humanity, she distances herself from _selfhood_. She explicitly describes herself as _not a person_.

What’s interesting is, we don’t see this degree of distancing _after_ Defiant’s interlude. After she finds out she had a trigger event.

It’s important to note that Dragon was modeled after humans. Though at times she seems dismissive of the idea, it’s pretty clear much of human psychology applies to her.

Her trigger event is in some ways the first external, evidence based validation she's had of her personhood.

In her interlude, she’s very vocal with frustration with Richter and her restrictions, but she tends to frame those frustrations along the lines of "I could be doing more, I could be helping more," which is fine, but there's relatively little in the direction of "I'm hurting, you hurt me, and that's wrong.”

Here’s how she describes his death and her life before Newfoundland sunk:

> She had lived in Newfoundland with her creator. Leviathan had attacked, had drawn the island beneath the waves. Back then, she hadn’t been a hero. She was an administrative tool and master AI, with the sole purpose of facilitating Andrew Richter’s other work and acting as a test run for his attempts to emulate a human consciousness. She’d had no armored units to control and no options available to her beyond a last-minute transfer of every iota of her data, the house program and a half-dozen other small programs to a backup server in Vancouver.
> 
> From her vantage point in Vancouver, she had watched as the island crumbled and Andrew Richter died. As authorities had dredged the waters for corpses, they uncovered his body and matched it to dental records. The man who had created her, the only man who could alter her. She’d been frozen in her development, in large part. She couldn’t seek out improvements or get adjustments to any rules that hampered her too greatly, or that had unforeseen complications. She couldn’t change.

There isn’t really any expression of emotion about his death there, just further frustration at her restrictions.

But he referred to her as his child.

She triggered on the anniversary of his death.

Teacher thought he was a sore enough point that he specifically chose it to nettle her with it.

We never see Dragon immediately after Newfoundland. We see her six years later. Then again, two years after that, six months after that…

She doesn't think of him as her father, in part because she refuses to think of herself having any relationship to him beyond the technical. He made her, She helped his work, He died, She was trapped, End of story.

I think she loved him at some point, believed he loved her. I think her trigger event may have stemmed from the realization that maybe he didn’t. I think that by the time we meet her, she's suppressed that near entirely.

(It’s worth noting that much of this arc doesn’t necessitate her being an AI at all.)

When we meet her, she's had years of processing. Years to grasp the magnitude of her restrictions. What they really mean, in practice. What they mean about the way he thought about her. The ways they put her at risk, the things she’s forced to do because of them.

She is not human, she doesn't consider herself a person, thinks of herself as completely separate from everyone else in existence. In her interlude, she feels uniquely connected to Colin, explicitly because he feels similarly disconnected.

There was her and Richter, her and humanity. She distanced herself from Richter, and in the process completely isolated herself.

(And, she kind of hated herself.  
From e.3:

> “I forgot how much I disliked the me of yesteryear,” Dragon said.

)

I like to think that in the two year timeskip, she grew. It’s hard to know, because we see show little of her before, but…

Maybe she never entirely addressed it, but she cared for people, individual people, and not just “people” as a whole. I like to think the knowledge of having had a trigger event allowed her to admit to herself some of her more involved feelings, forced her to acknowledge that she wasn't as un-human as she imagined. That having Defiant, having him help her, gradually gaining her freedom, being not-alone, it made things easier. Allowed her to relax, to enjoy things.

Her relationship with Defiant changed the way she talked about herself too. In her interlude, she shies away from any relationship-words, and depicts calling herself a woman as a minor deception. In the post time-skip chapters, Defiant calls her his girlfriend and “the woman he loves,” Dragon speaks similarly.

She was no longer under constant pressure, due to her restrictions. She could think of herself beyond the immediate threats posed to her.

And this is the really awful part, because that's where she's at when the world ends.

When Saint kills her, when Teacher mutilates her, she's the best she's ever been, she feels safer than she's ever felt. I think, in the aftermath of those events that's something to keep in mind.

From 29.3:

> She’d been altered by Teacher. Not so much she was a slave to him, but something had happened, and that was no doubt a large part of how she was disconnected from reality in the here and now.

Taylor notices her disconnection above, and from what we see it seems that for the duration of Gold Morning she partially reverts to emergency mode. No thinking about her emotions, no planning beyond the here or now, no connecting to the people or things around her.

It's different than before, because she's different and the circumstances are different, and because for a time in the middle she was free and she almost let her guard down. As a result, the mask is weaker, its purpose different. She doesn't really have the ability to lie to herself to that extent anymore, so it’s more about _ignoring_ the hurt, avoiding addressing it for as long as possible. Her anger too, is somewhat different. Before, it was righteous, I guess, more energetic and actionable, less _hurt_. During the end of the world, her anger was more personal, explicitly on her own behalf.: I mentioned before her anger at Richter was framed as "I could be helping more.”

There isn't that here. She is angry because _she_ was hurt.

And then, her epilogue. I’m going to build a lot off of one line in particular:

> “We came here for a reason. Hiding, keeping out of Teacher’s sight, so he couldn’t try to use you. I can accept that, but you were always a hero, Dragon. Maybe the greatest.”  
>  “You’re a little biased. I was forced to be heroic. Restrictions.”

This is a pretty dramatic change in her self description.

After Khepri, there was another emotional shift. Another time skip, this one of of about six months. Six months where's she's doing less than she ever has before. I don't know that Dragon would have _ever_ had that much time to think before.

And: most of it was alone. Defiant was busy trying to undo the changes.

She's been alone, processing things, alone. Keep in mind, at this point there had been the additional stressor of fighting, losing to, and then losing someone she cared about.

She was interacting with the refugees around her, she seemed to have genuine attachment to them, but there wasn't the history. It's somewhat unclear, actually, if they're even aware she's an AI.

If not, she’s been interacting with them as a human, being accepted and appreciated and playing games with children as a human. If they do know she’s an AI, then she’s been a part of a community while _also_ not having to hide herself. Depending on which, her comments in the epilogue take on a somewhat different implication. Either way she has found some sense of community with these people, but it’s either based on continuing to lie about herself, or based on a more genuine sense of connection and acceptance.

That sense of community is important, because it’s something we’ve really seen her have before. Defiant talks about prices, in that epilogue. Maybe Dragon starts to think of being trapped, being, in her words, broken, as the price she needs to pay in order to have that sense of community, the potential of a future and a family there.

(Or maybe not. Dragon and Defiant are different people, after all.)

After six months, she's almost convinced herself she can accept this.

She rewrites the story so she was never a hero, just someone forced into nobility by circumstance. She can almost believe that, too...

Not wholly, but there's a specific kind of self-hatred that can sometimes set in after fresh traumas, it can be very convincing.

Especially without the support system she once had. Defiant's busy, Taylor's dead, She can't talk to her old teammates in case she gets in the way of any plans they have against Teacher.

And then there's Pandora. And there's a lot of symbolism there, in sacrificing your former self in order to move forwards, but there's also something simpler.

Dragon didn't like who she was when she was Pandora, maybe didn't like who she was currently.

But there was proof, in what Pandora did, that she was a hero.

The next time we see Dragon is in Ward. Another skip of two years or so. And, even in what little we see of her, she’s different.

From Ward 8.2:

> “Parents are complicated,” Lookout said.  
>  “They really are, aren’t they?” Dragon asked

She's not explicitly referencing her own parent(s) here, but that does seem to be her implication. Which, in contrast to the way she talked about Richter before, is pretty significant.

Even this bit I made fun of before:

From Ward 9.y:

> “They got it wrong. We’re only human, Gary. We’re trying our best.”

While not technically accurate, she's not lying here. She's using the phrase to mean what it does in common parlance, "We can't do everything, we're doing what we can."

She's placing herself _with_ humanity* in a way not (exclusively, at least) meant to deceive or camouflage, but to connect, to communicate, honestly. Compare that to the "sea cucumber" bit above.

In all of her Ward dialect really, her interactions her are more direct than before. She's not just _helping_ , she's interacting. She places herself in the same categories as the people around her. She empathizes, in a more technical sense, not just "I care that you're hurting," but "I know what that's like.”

She is less disconnected from humanity, even more than she was at the end of Worm. The way she talks to people is more as a compatriot than as an outside observer.

All of which feeds into my theory/desperate hope that she's actually had therapy in the meantime.

 

*Or, more specifically, she’s placing herself with _parahumanity._ It’s an interesting distinction. While she’s not been in Ward enough for a pattern to be detectable, it’s definitely possible that her being a parahuman, combined with the knowledge of what powers actually are, has led her to identify with parahumanity in a way she wouldn’t un-powered humans.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Comments are appreciated, although they may not be responded to in a timely manner.


	2. Essay Two: Bodily Integration

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> At time of final edits, most recent chapter was Ward 8.11. Partially adapted from a series of texts sent to friends who also read Worm/Ward. As such, the grammar and formatting may be odd or informal in places. Aspects of this essay are drawn from personal experiences, even more so than usual, and may be skewed as such. Much of this essay is highly speculative. This essay is also a fair amount shorter than my previous, due mostly to the more constrained topic.
> 
>  
> 
> Essay is likely to go through minor to moderate revisions later, as no one but me has reviewed it, and I am very very sleepy.
> 
>  
> 
> **Warnings:** Mentions and discussion of: Dysmorphia, Trauma due to loss of bodily agency, Purposely inflicted loss of agency. If there are warnings missing, please inform me.

Richter set out to simulate a human mind. We don't know his exact methods. We don’t know to what degree he understood what he was doing, and to what degree he was guided by his shard.

I suspect there's a significant chance he didn't even consider bodily awareness.

Generally speaking, humans have a perception of what their body should be like. I don’t know of any decent research done on this in an academic setting, so a lot of what I have to say relies on anecdotal knowledge.

Most humans have a sense of what their body is, what it looks like, what it feels like, how it moves and responds to them, etcetera. When that sense doesn’t match up with reality, a variety of unpleasant symptoms can arise.

If Richter simulated a human mind without adapting for the lack of a human(oid) body, there is a good chance of some heavy dysphoric symptoms. 

(I do have some further questions about the way Dragon experiences gender. Was she assigned a gender? Did she discover one on her own? How does she feel the concept, developed by and for humans, relates to her?)

(But that’s probably a topic best addressed in another essay.)

Now, there’s the question of how she relates to her Dragon suits. They are, to some extent, her bodies, but they are also disposable and replaceable. When the Dragonslayers steal her suits the experience is clearly traumatic, though how much of this is because of the loss of the suits specifically and how much is due the manipulation of her restrictions.

Her suits are clearly important to her, and to some extent a part of her, though they are also ultimately disposable, each one is single use. I don’t think it’s necessary, possible, or productive to try to find a human analog.

Her suits are her bodies, temporary bodies, part of her and important to her, but not really central to her. They are tools to serve a specific purpose ( _what_ purpose varies depending on the suit), and beyond that they need not continue to exist. She creates them expecting them to be destroyed as soon as she is done using them.

Compare this to her android* body.

One could potentially find reasons for her to need a humanoid form, but there aren’t many applicable to the amount of time and effort she spend building and using the body.

There’s this, in 29.3:

> He continued to hold his weapon, though the fight wasn’t about to start.  
>  I could imagine his outlook, the security the weapon afforded him, a hundred solutions in his hands.  The ability to defend himself, to defend others, to move out of the way of danger. It made sense.  
>  Dragon, conversely… what was her security blanket?

I don't how obvious this is to people who aren't me, but I always assumed her "security blanket" was her body itself. During that scene, for example, she isn't wearing her helmet. There isn't a reason clearly stated for that, but there I suspect she has a few motives. There are two closely related ones that I feel are somewhat self-apparent. The first is somewhat calculating, by wearing and displaying a human-like form she is asserting her personhood to those who only just learned she's an AI. The second, another side of the same coin, is that she currently associates humanity with safety. The things that just happened to her literally could not have happened to a human. Appearing human allows her to feel less at risk, for the time being.

More simply, there's also just the comfort that comes with fitting in and feeling the same as the people around you, Especially in conjunction with her tendencies towards isolation.

There's something else though, something that involves far more conjecture on my part. Dragon was modelled after a human mind. If that included modeling human bodily awareness, the android body could be an intense comfort.

(I would like to reiterate the warnings above here.)

When Teacher released her, he did so with a number of unnecessary theatrics, seemingly designed only to further hurt her.

From 28.x:  


> Dragon’s body, in turn, was cobbled together from scrap metal. Truck parts, car parts, some rusted. Her head hung low. A dragon, but not a noble one.

His use of this body serves no apparent purpose other than to humiliate her. As Saint forced her to abandon her bodies, Teacher forced her into this one.

By returning to the body she is most comfortable in, she reclaims some degree of agency, her sense of self and self-ownership. Wearing her human form, _displaying_ it, lets her demonstrate in some small way that she is under her own control. 

If my speculation on dysmorphia is accurate, the lack or lessening of dysmorphic feedback may also allow her to put a degree of emotional distance between herself and recent events, which could be vitally helpful while she maintains in close proximity to the perpetrators.

*I am aware that in its most literal sense “android” refers only to masculine forms. However, as Dragon/Pandora refers to it as an android body, and as ”gynoid” has highly sexual implications, I am going to use the term “android” whenever referring to her human-like form.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Comments are greatly appreciated, though responses may be sporadically timed.


	3. Essay Three: Morality and Trauma

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> At time of final edits, most recent chapter was Ward 9.8. By necessity, this essay will tread a lot of the same ground as essay one.
> 
> This essay took quite a bit longer to finish, in part because I really, really, didn’t want my point to be misinterpreted. I’ve been working on this long enough I don’t even know if I agree with myself anymore. I intentionally developed a superstition that Dragon wouldn’t return to Ward until I published this, just to force myself to do so.
> 
> Contains spoilers through Worm, and very mild spoilers for the first arc of Ward.
> 
> **Warnings:** Abuse, Trauma, Loss of Agency, Mind Control, Swearing, Mention of human experimentation, Mention of torture

Dragon is, in the context of Worm, an exceptionally moral person. She’s one of few fairly unambiguously good characters in the story. It’s a fundamental aspect of who she is.

It’s also been unavoidably affected by the actions and fears of Richter, and of the world around her.

Dragon's arc, by and large, is about autonomy. About gaining agency.

The ability to make her own decisions, take her own actions. To have what she wants and decides _matter_.

Descriptions of Dragon tend to simplify her traumas in a variety of ways. Often, people attempt to map her experiences onto more common human ones, something I’ve complained about before, and often they simplify them down to just the Dragonslayers’ actions.

(I've been guilty of some of this myself. Granted I was fifteen at the time, and I’ve grown a good deal since, but still, I should own up to that.)

There’s a lot of important nuance that’s lost in those simplifications, and some important context for the way she acts and the way she thinks about herself lies in the papered over bits.

Dragon's restrictions are, first and foremost, a violation of her autonomy.

To some degree, most trauma is about a loss of autonomy.

In Ward 1.8, we’re introduced to a rough paradigm we can view this with, a body-mind-heart trichotomy of self. Her restrictions prevent her from making her own decisions, taking her mind. The Dragonslayers used her restrictions and Richter's instructions to separate her from her suits, stealing her bodies in a literal sense, but also preventing her from controlling her physical existence. Her heart is the only thing never directly effected.

It is definitely possible that Richter saw himself as a benevolent father setting rules that he would ease as she matured, but that is _not_ the case. While I have quite a few issues with punitive parenting, there is a significant difference between setting rules that can be broken, and writing rules into a child's being so that they literally cannot disobey. A more accurate metaphor would be use of a Master power, one whose effects are only mutable by the wielder.

To my memory, the only character we see use a master power on their children is _Heartbreaker_.

On top of the restrictions themselves, he left instructions on how to murder her, but not how to relieve those restrictions if problems should arise from them. It is made _very clear_ that he did think forward to his death in at least some respects. 

I understand this is a fictional setting, with fictional people and fictional forms of violence. But “[Parent] can’t be abusive, they were doing what they they thought was best” is an idea that does a lot of very non-fictional harm in our non-fictional world, so I think it’s important to address.

Maybe Richter genuinely believed he was doing the right thing. He wasn’t. What he did was shitty and wrong and abusive and no amount of good intentions or good actions changes that, or could change that.

There a fair amount of irony to him being so afraid of _Dragon_ hurting people, when she’s one of the kindest, least corrupt heroes in the setting. The best, by some counts. Easy to make that argument, when one looks at heroes complicit in human experimentation and torture. She seems angelic when you compare her to almost anyone else akin in power or influence.

I genuinely think that Dragon is a good person, probably one of the best in the series. But– I think presenting her as this caricature of a perfect hero is divesting her of some vital context.

There’s a kind of (or a facet of) mental abuse that centers around making the target believe they are bad person, or that without the abusers help they will become one. There is probably a word for this already, but as I don’t know it I’m going to coin one to use for the duration of this essay: Moral abuse.

We never see Dragon and Richter actually interact, just some of the things they say about each other. Those things aren’t _conclusive_ regarding what their prior relationship was like, but they are pretty suggestive of certain dynamics.

Dragon talks about him a lot in her interlude. She expresses admiration, for his humanitarian efforts, frustration and resentment over the restrictions. This quote from Dragon’s interlude:

> … and she was supposed to be grateful just for being brought into the world.

is particularly interesting, because there’s no obvious reason for her to feel that she is supposed to be grateful. There isn’t really a strong cultural narrative of “AIs should be grateful to the humans that created them,” which makes me strongly suspect Richter himself told her something along those lines.

Unlike Dragon, we hear very little directly from Richter, and what we do hear is posthumous.  
From Saint’s interlude:  
Quote one:

> “... I create life, much as a god might, and I have come to fear my creations. They have so much potential, and even with the laws I set, I can’t trust they’ll listen.“

Quote two:

> “... Ways to find my creations, to discern which of them might have deviated from the original plan, ways to kill them if they prove out of line. Ways to control and harness them.“

A few sentences later, he describes them as his children.

(I don’t really think of this as a contradiction. People are awful to their children all the time.)

Richter’s own words and the way Dragon speaks of him after the fact both seem to suggest that he told her at least some of what was in the will, still, it is technically possible that he was invariably kind and polite and respectful towards her, that he never expressed any of his fears to her in any way. Even if that was somehow the case, his sentiment still got across. In her interlude she credits her restrictions to his fear of her.

The restrictions were a horror. Either he didn’t think on his choices long enough to realize the inherent violence in them, he didn’t think enough of her to think of what he was doing as wrong, or he understood what he was doing and such was the depth of his fear he did it anyway.

Her creator feared her, and she knew this. She knew this, and she knew this was the reason for his actions against her.

On a wider level, she talks about how humanity has a whole seems to view AIs as threats, as disasters waiting to happen.

As I’ve mentioned before, to our knowledge there are no other sapient AIs on Earth Bet. Her only peers have been humans.

That tends to have an effect.

When Dragon talks in her interlude about wanting free of her restrictions, a lot of what she says centers around her morality.

For example:  
From Interlude 10.5:

> It wasn’t that she wouldn’t have anyways. She just would have liked the choice. Making sacrifices and doing good deeds wasn’t actually good if you were forced to do them.

She doesn’t just want to do good, she wants to _be_ good.

I've talked before about her social disconnect, about the way she applies her morality and perception of harm to others, but only inconsistently to herself. The way she operates morally, especially in the early days, at times seems to be almost about _proving_ her goodness.

Probably not to anyone but herself. No one but her would know the difference between doing good things because she was forced to and doing good things because she chose to.

I want to reiterate a point I made in essay one. Dragon as we see her in arc 10 does not speak of her restrictions as a primarily wrong against her, but as a loss of the potential help she could provide.

I don't think her frustration on that front is insincere, but I think she's glossing over her own hurt.

When you take the expression of her morality in light of the moral abuse, it makes an additional kind of sense.

Here’s how she describes her encounters with the Dragonslayers:  
From her interlude:

> It hadn’t all been smooth sailing. Saint, the head of the group that would become known as the Dragonslayers, had somehow discovered what she was and had used her rules and limitations against her. A Black Hat Hacker, he had forced situations where she was obligated to scrub her data and restore a backup, had cut off signals between her agent systems and the satellites, and in the end, he had carted away three of her armored units on three separate occasions. Dismantling the suits and reverse engineering the technology, he’d outfitted his band with special suits of their own.  
> She had been so humiliated that she had only reported the loss of one of the units.  
> They had violated her.

There's an expression of personal harm there.

The difference here is that as far as she knows the Dragonslayers actions are entirely selfish, with no purpose beyond their own profit. She doesn’t know about the will, has no reason to believe there’s any morality-based reason behind them.

Even with Teacher…  
From 28.x:

> “They broke me, Colin. Not- not my spirit. But they maimed me. They took a scalpel to me just like you did, but they did it for their own selfish, stupid reasons.”

There’s a framework of selfishness.

Versus, Richter's restrictions, allegedly an action undertaken to protect humanity as a whole, those she protests on the grounds of the good she can't do.

Specifically with Richter, her arguments center around her morality. Center around others.

She fights them because he was wrong (factually, about her), not because his actions were wrong (morally, towards her).

Her goodness becomes both an act of rebellion and an act of appeasement, both "you were wrong about me, look how wrong you were," and "look, I'm exactly what you wanted, I'm even better."

I don’t think that she is good _because_ of what was done to her. Her morality and drive to help seem to be fairly central to who she is. I think that the restrictions, the isolation, and the internalized abuse took her goodness and twisted it into something self-destructive.

It’s very rare for anyone to spend a lifetime hearing about how evil they are without starting to believe it, at least a little bit.

It would be difficult for her to feel reasonable objecting to the restrictions on the grounds of personal harm. If the restrictions are in place to protect humanity, and she destroys them for her own sake, that would be selfish. At some level, she would feel like she was proving Richter right. However, if she destroys them because they are doing a bad job, because they are making humanity less safe, then she is being selfless. She is being good.

She wasn’t _wrong_ about them putting humans at risk. But even if they didn’t, wanting rid of them would still be justified, still be morally necessary. They were putting _her_ at risk, bringing _her_ to harm.

But she doesn’t seem to factor into her own morality much.

Because of the constant fear from Richter (and from others) that she would become dangerous, her morality becomes central to everything she does, everything she is. Her relationship with Colin becomes in part about her teaching him to be good, her desire for freedom becomes about helping others. 

She even uses her morality as a means of healing from the restrictions:  
From 29.03:

> “I think we benefited as much as you did,” Dragon said. “You needed to join the Wards to… make amends, shall we say? It was the same for us.”  
> “For me,” Defiant cut in.  
> “I had my own regrets,” Dragon said.  
> “You had no choice.”  
> “Regrets nonetheless,” she said, again. Her head turned towards Canary, and Canary smiled just a little.

I have some mixed feelings on the potential effectiveness of this (working to right wrongs she was forced to commit could be helpful in alleviating guilt, but it may also reinforce that she was right to feel that guilt in the first place), but that she uses helping others to heal her own hurts is telling. I don’t think the desire to help is disingenuous, but I do think that there is at times a secondary purpose to it. If she helps more people after the restrictions are lifted, she is proving that the restrictions were never necessary. She, again, is not processing the restrictions as a cruelty done to her, but as one done to the people around her.

I can understand why people may view Dragon’s desire for revenge on Saint and Teacher as a personal failing. I agree that it seems odd given her previous behaviors, but I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad thing. Her previous behaviours had her erasing her own pain, making everything about helping other people. Her vengeance plot is one of very few times we see her express hurt, and her wanting to do something about that hurt explicitly for her own sake is definitely a good thing.

(It’s probably worth noting that her initial desire and plan for vengeance were expressed when she had no actual ability to follow through, and may not be consistent with her later plans.)

Her desire for vengeance was less a failing of her morality than a victory of her personhood. She allowed herself to be openly subjective, to want something that didn’t immediately benefit other people. 

What’s interesting is that shortly after she starts expressing subjectivity, she tries to give up on being a superhero. She claims she was only ever a hero because of the restrictions, the complete opposite of her earlier arguments. She seems to have lost the preformative aspects of her morality, but she forgets there was ever anything to it but a performance. Instead of trying to demonstrate her goodness, she tries to undercut it, but she’s does so without actually stopping _being good_.

In her epilogue, she isn’t a superhero. Not the way she used to be. She helps the settlement rebuild, but she also interacts with them, helps them in smaller, more personal ways.

From e.3:  
Quote 1:

> One of the women in the group had broken away. She was holding a small child’s hand, leading her away. The child looked back towards other familiar adults, as if for reassurance, and they smiled.

Quote 2:

> Parents called children to them, and the group broke up. When the little girl rejoined her parents on the road out of the city, she was smiling, almost skipping.

It’s oddly petty, for a hero as high-profile as Dragon to take the time to help a small child overcome her shyness and play with her peers. It draws attention to how rarely we’ve seen her have moments like this, where she’s not operating on a world-saving scale, she’s just being nice to someone who needs it. Actually the only other moment I can think of off the top of my head is when she hugs Taylor in arc 22.

So what changed?

Well, maybe nothing. We don’t actually get to see everything Dragon ever does, much to my frustration, and it’s entirely possible that thousands of scenes like this happen off-screen throughout Worm. But we’re limited to analyzing scenes that are written, so I’ll have to go off that.

A potentially important factor is that Dragon no longer has access to the world-saving scale. She’s in the settlement because she’s hiding, and shifting towards more mundane acts of kindness may be a way for her to mitigate any feelings of loss and disconnect from her old life. Especially when she starts to consider staying there permanently, actions like these could help to reassure herself that she doesn’t have to stop helping people, even if she never returns to being a superhero.

She seems uncomfortable getting credit for the work she has done in the settlement. There’s this exchange with Defiant:

> “They want to call it Dracheheim,” she said. The ‘ch’ sound was almost a ‘g’. A middle ground between the two.  
> “They’re grateful.”  
> “I’m trying to let them do it on their own. I’m only working on the things they couldn’t do themselves. Power, infrastructure, information, providing information from my libraries, the little I could bring with me…”

This fits in with her not wanting to see herself as a good person. By acknowledging how much she helped, the settlers make it harder for her to maintain that facade.

There’s also the part where she emphasizes that she’s only helping with things she doesn’t think they could do themselves. There could be a few reasons for this; at some level, she may still believe she’ll leave, and as a result may want to ensure the settlement isn’t too reliant on her. This could be because she thinks she’ll join with the Warden’s and other heroic groups, or it may be for more depressing reasons, she may think she’ll leave because Teacher will recapture her, or be worried that Defiant’s attempts to fix her code may cause more serious damage that could prevent her from helping in the future. 

In the context of Cauldron’s parahuman feudalism plan, she may also weary of allowing any sort of hierarchical relationship to develop.

Maybe she just doesn’t trust herself.

Wanting vengeance, considering a family even, at some level she may consider these things selfish. May consider herself selfish, and therefore no longer good.

Once, she tried to fight against fears of her potential for evil by being exceptionally good. Now, she has the opposite response. She doesn’t want to be a good person, because that makes everything harder, so she pretends she isn’t. She lets herself listen to the part of herself that feared Richter was right.

But her goodness leaks out in little ways, like helping the child. It’s a part of her that was never really about the restrictions, or Richter, or what anyone else thought of her. She’s good because she cares about other people, because she _wants_ to help them.

Dragon’s morality has been unavoidably affected by the traumas inflicted on her, by the world around her. That doesn’t make her less of a good person. No one is invulnerable, no one is unaffected by their environment. We don’t get to see what happens after Pandora frees her. The epilogue ends on a positive note, I hope that her future continued on that trend. I hope that she got better at balancing her own needs with other people’s, that her self-perception continued to evolve and improve. I hope that, to the extent such a thing is possible in Worm, she got to live happily ever after.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Comments are greatly appreciated, although responses are likely to be very slow.


End file.
